2 min lesson
The framework reflex
Draft your 30-second answer to "what would you want to own at Cursor?" What makes it land?
Step 1 of 2
You will be asked to defend opinions about Cursor and its competitors live, not in the abstract. Have a real point of view on where Copilot, Windsurf, Claude Code and Zed are strong and where they leak and be ready to say what you'd change in Cursor itself.
When you give a structured answer, lead with judgment and only name the structure if asked. Say “I'd cut everything except the one slice a power user feels on day one, because Cursor's edge is taste and speed” - not “I'll use a RICE framework.” At Cursor, the framework name is a yellow flag; the cut you'd actually make is the green one.
“I run Cursor as my daily driver - Agent for multi-file refactors, Tab everywhere and @-context to pull the right files into a change. The surface I'd want to own is the trust gap on agent edits: when the diff is too big to verify, I stop trusting it and I think that's the thing standing between Cursor and full agent-assisted adoption. That's the loop I'd want to close.”
Reaching for a named framework as your first move reads as process-PM instinct, which is exactly the profile Cursor is not hiring. Structure your thinking, but surface the concrete cut, the user's pain and the metric. Bring questions that show you understand the flat culture - “who decides what ships?” lands better than “what's the roadmap process?”